Attention Archives - Page 4 of 8

M Is for Mental Model

January 25, 2017 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Your brain maintains a model of the world that represents what’s normal in it for you. The result is that you experience a stripped-down, customized version of the actual world. To a great extent, each of us really does inhabit our own world. But it would be incorrect to say that we create our reality; rather, our brain creates our reality for us.

Consciousness is a way of projecting all the activity in your nervous system into a simpler form. [It] gives you a summary that is useful for the larger picture, useful at the scale of apples and rivers and humans with whom you might be able to mate. —David Eagleman

Much, if not most, of what you do, think, and feel consists of automatically generated responses to internal or external stimuli. And it isn’t possible to consciously mediate all of your responses. It wouldn’t even be a good idea to try.

But how does your brain do it? How does it decide what to prune and what to allow into your consciousness? It would be highly inefficient if it had to process all of this data bit-by-bit. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to since it operates by association, which is much faster, and by filtering incoming data through the model of the world it constructs that represents what’s normal in it for you.

Built by Association

System 1, the unconscious part of your brain, uses associative thinking to develop and maintain your model of the world. However, there are some problems with associative thinking. For example:

It sacrifices accuracy for speed.
It doesn’t discriminate very well.
It takes cognitive shortcuts (aka cognitive biases).

Your mental model can—and sometimes does—lead to erroneous conclusions and inappropriate responses. It’s the job of consciousness to check the impulses and suggestions it receives from System 1, but consciousness is slow, lazy, and easily depleted. Most of the time, it’s content to go along with System 1, which means it’s susceptible to cognitive biases. By definition, cognitive biases are distortions or errors in thinking. They actually decrease your understanding while giving you a feel-good sense of cognitive ease.

Confirmation bias is the easy acceptance of information that validates what you already believe. It causes you to selectively notice and pay attention to what confirms your beliefs and to ignore what doesn’t. It underlies the discomfort you feel around people who disagree with you and the ease you feel around people who share your beliefs.

Information that confirms what you already believe to be true makes you feel right and certain, so you’re likely to accept it uncritically. On the other hand, you’re more likely to reject information that is inconsistent with what you already believe or at least you hold inconsistent information up to greater scrutiny. You have different standards for evaluating information depending on the level of cognitive ease it generates.

Evidence has precious little impact on any of us if it conflicts with what we believe simply because the cognitive strain of processing it is too great. To a very real extent, we don’t even “see” conflicting evidence. While total commitment to your particular worldview (mental model) makes you feel more confident, it narrows—rather than expands—your possibilities. That means it limits your powers of discernment, your ability to increase your understanding of the world around you, and your creative potential. It closes the world off instead of opening it up.

Your Particular Model of the World

In addition to helping you navigate the world, your mental model gives rise to your sense of the way things should be. It generates expectations that are either confirmed or denied, assumptions, biases, etc. that determine what you pay attention to, what you perceive (even what you are able to perceive), how you interpret and respond to what you perceive, and the meaning you make of it all. Your mental model is the result of your genes and your experiences, of both intention and accident. Your brain has been constructing your particular model of the world since your birth, and it is continually updating and modifying it—most of the time entirely outside your awareness.

But while the contents of your mental model determine what you think, feel, do, and say, you can’t search them—or follow a bread-crumb trail backward through them—to find out precisely which aspects (and when and how they came to be) give rise to any specific facet of who you are and how you react now.

The significance of your mental model in your life can’t be overstated. Although you aren’t consciously aware of it, your mental model circumscribes not only every aspect of your present experience but also what is possible for you to do and be. It determines what you see and how you see the world, both literally and figuratively, as well as how you see yourself.

So it stands to reason that you won’t be successful in making long-lasting changes to your behavior, beliefs, or attitude unless you are able to change your mental model.

Changing the Status Quo

The often-quoted statement is true: we don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are. If you want to live a fuller live, if you want to be more effective or useful or loving in the world, you first need to recognize that your greatest constraints are imposed by your own mental model.

You can’t do away with your mental model—or “think outside the box,” since the box is your mental model. But you can expand it through learning, through exposing yourself to new situations, people, and ideas, and through physical movement. You can grow new neurons and generate new neuronal connections and pathways. Those new neuronal pathways represent alterations to your mental model, a change in your status quo to a new normal for you.

Part of the series A-Z: An Alphabet of Change.

D Is for Desired Outcome

November 23, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

We repeatedly begin projects, large or small, start working on goals, long- or short-term, say yes or no when asked to do something or to participate with others, and make choices about how to spend our time. And far too often, we don’t stop to consider what we hope will happen as a result of the actions we’re about to take.

This isn’t to say we can’t come up with an explanation as to why we’re doing something—or at least why we think we’re doing it. Explaining ourselves to ourselves comes naturally to us. But having a reason for doing something isn’t the same thing as identifying the desired outcome.

You could be going on a job interview because you hope to get hired or because you’re thinking about quitting your current job and are testing the waters or because a relative hooked you up and you feel obligated…or…or…or. Those are some reasons you might have for keeping the appointment for that interview.

Let’s say you’re hoping to get hired. What’s your desired outcome? Maybe it’s simply to have a job so you can pay your bills. Or maybe you want to move up into a more challenging or more prestigious position. Maybe you’re looking for a congenial group of co-workers so you can expand your circle of friends. Or you might want a calmer work environment with less stress than you have now—or a more stimulating environment. It could even be a combination of factors.

If you’re clear about what you hope will happen as a result of getting the job, you’ll be better able to evaluate whether or not to take it if it’s offered to you. At the interview itself, you’ll be able to ask more informed questions and pay attention to things that are relevant to your concerns. Knowing the desired outcome you’re looking for is pretty important since it increases your chances of getting it. But if you accept the job offer without having identified your desired outcome, you set yourself up for being disappointed. Sure the money’s extremely good and the work is interesting enough but you don’t get to interact with very many other people and, as it turns out, the social aspect is really important to you. In fact, you realize you’d be willing to earn less in exchange for having more interpersonal interaction.

So you have the new job, which looks good on paper, but it isn’t as satisfying as you thought it would be.

Reality Check

In addition to changing jobs, we get into or out of relationships, take up hobbies, move from one part of the country to another, decide to go back to school (or drop out), sign up for a gym membership, start a diet, buy a complete new wardrobe—or a set of patio furniture or an expensive camera or a car. We not only fail to identify our desired outcome, we also fail to identify potential obstacles we’re likely to face along the path to getting it.

Included in the “Reality Check” exercise my clients complete when filling out a Goal Action Plan are these three questions.

Imagine a positive vision (fantasy) of achieving your desired outcome and describe it. How will your status quo be changed?*
Describe your current reality in regard to your desired outcome.
Compare your positive vision of success with your current reality.

*Please note, though, that if all you do is generate a positive vision of your desired outcome and focus on that without doing anything else, you are less likely to be successful in achieving it because you’ve actually tricked your brain into thinking you’ve already got it.

Answering all three questions is a form of mental contrasting that can help you see your situation more realistically and identify the obstacles to achieving your desired outcome. If you know the obstacles you’re likely to face, you can figure out how to deal with them ahead of time instead of being blind-sided by them. Or you may realize there’s an obstacle big enough to be a deal-breaker, at least for now.

When we perform mental contrasting, we gain energy to take action. And when we go on to specify the actions we intend to take as obstacles arise, we energize ourselves even further. —Gabriele Oettingen, Rethinking Positive Thinking

Evaluate and Motivate

The more clearly you can visualize your desired outcome the better you’ll be able to evaluate how likely it is that the action you’re contemplating is the best path to getting there. If it is, great! That clarity can be highly motivating. If it isn’t, that’s great, too, because you can change or revise your plan and save yourself the time, energy, and effort of going off on a wild goose chase.

The longer-term your goal is or the more entrenched the habit you want to change or the more difficult or complicated the course of action you’re contemplating, the more imperative it is to identify your desired outcome. The unconscious part of your brain is hooked on instant gratification. Changing the status quo tends to be gradual, mundane, repetitious, and tedious. Being able to remind yourself not only what you’re aiming for but also why it’s important to you can get you through the slog.

But developing the habit of identifying your desired outcome is useful in all kinds of situations, such as responding to a social media post, attending a staff meeting at work, choosing a book to read, or planning a vacation. I recently got together with a friend to work out details of an upcoming trip (the reason for our meeting). But a big part of my desired outcome—and hers, too—was the opportunity to spend time discussing subjects of mutual interest, including current events. Identifying my desired outcome affected both my frame of mind and the amount of time I reserved for the meeting.

It’s a truism because it’s true: it’s considerably easier to get what you want if you know what that is.

Part of the series A-Z: An Alphabet of Change.

5 Characteristics of Innovative Thinkers

August 31, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Innovative thinking doesn’t require an innate talent or special technique. It isn’t limited to artists or inventors or any other group of people. If you want to develop your innovative thinking skills, focus on these five characteristics.

1. Be Curious

Curiosity prepares your brain for learning and long-term memory. It also activates the brain’s reward system. When you’re curious about something, you anticipate discovering more about it. And your brain treats the answer or the new knowledge the same way it treats any kind of reward—by releasing hits of dopamine.

Curiosity increases activity in the hippocampus, which involves the creation of memories. When there is a higher level of interactivity between the reward system and the hippocampus, your brain is more likely to remember the new information—as well as incidental information you encountered along the way.

Curiosity may put the brain in a state that allows it to learn and retain any kind of information, like a vortex that sucks in what you are motivated to learn, and also everything around it. –Dr. Matthias Gruber, UC Davis

2. Be Passionate

When you’re passionate about learning something, creating something, or solving a particular problem, working on it doesn’t feel like work no matter how effortful it might be. Passion is motivating. It keeps you engaged and helps you through the rough or confusing spots, so you’re more likely to keep going instead of getting bored or giving up. Obsession isn’t necessarily a bad thing. When you’re passionate about something, you spend more time working with or thinking about it, which expands your capacity for innovation and creativity within that area.

The more different kinds of experiences you have and the more you learn, in general, the more opportunities you give yourself to discover what you’re passionate about. This isn’t the same thing as “finding your passion.” You can be passionate about several things at the same time or about different things over the course of your life.

Passion is one great force that unleashes creativity, because if you’re passionate about something, then you’re more willing to take risks. –Yo-Yo Ma

3. Be Willing to Fail

The unconscious part of the brain is risk averse, but while avoiding risks can get you incremental gains, it won’t really get you innovation or invention. It’s true that just because you can imagine something, that doesn’t mean it’s possible or viable. On the other hand, you won’t know until you try.

The occurrence of failure is less important than how you respond to it. If you treat it as feedback (information), there is always something you can learn from it to help you decide what to do next. If you treat it as evidence that there’s something wrong with you or your idea or course of action, you’re unlikely to get anything out of it.

And the failure to solve a problem can actually be the key to its eventual solution:

Failure to solve a problem stimulates your brain to store a special, easily retrieved memory of the problem. This memory energizes all of your associations to the information in the problem, sensitizing you to anything in your environment that might be relevant. —John Kounios and Mark Beeman, The Eureka Factor

There are no guarantees in life. If you can learn to live with uncertainty and recognize failure as feedback, you’re actually more likely to succeed.

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. –Thomas A. Edison

4. Take Action

I’ll let Tim Ferris take this one: “Not yet!” one might say (and I have said often). More research, more preparation, more interviews, more… procrastination. Let’s call it what it often is: a forgiving term for a terrible habit. To create anything remarkable, it takes not one giant leap after perfect prep, but many baby steps in the right direction once you have barely enough to get started. To start something big, you have to first start something small.

The keywords here are “start something.” When you take action, you get more information in the form of feedback and you learn things you wouldn’t have learned if you simply continued thinking about your project. Taking any action can have unexpected results and undesired consequences. Although you can anticipate that such things might occur, you can’t plan for them because you won’t know what they are until after they happen.

An excellent motto to adopt is create and adjust. Until you begin actively creating, you have nothing to adjust.

5. Use Both Parts of Your Brain

Creativity and innovative thinking involve both parts of the brain—the conscious and the unconscious. Sometimes you need to apply focused (System 2) attention, which is linear, logical, effortful, and slow. But attempting to sustain System 2 attention is counterproductive. Sometimes you need unfocused (System 1) attention, which is associative, non-logical, runs in the background, and is fast.

Too much logical, linear thinking is as bad as too little. After framing the problem or situation and considering possible solutions, turn it over to your unconscious for a while and see what it comes up with. Let your mind wander instead of keeping it on a tight leash. Research indicates that if you take a break from a problem and come back to it later, you’re more likely to be able to solve the problem than you would be if you continued working on it without the interruption.

Should You Try
Living Without Goals?

August 17, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

No. Just no.

Yes, there are some folks out there who are quite insistent that instead of setting goals, you should put all your attention on your habits. It’s like advising a writer that instead of using nouns, she should put all her attention on verbs. We need both nouns and verbs. And we need both goals and good habits.

I’ve also come across more than a couple of people in the behavior-change field who seem to confuse goals with habits.

A goal is the state of affairs that a plan is intended to achieve and that (when achieved) terminates behavior intended to achieve it.

A goal requires ongoing conscious (System 2) attention. You decide what your desired outcome is (the new state of affairs), and then you create a plan to achieve it. Once you’ve achieved your goal, you don’t keep working toward it. You’re done. A goal has an end point.

A habit, on the other hand, is a recurring, often unconscious pattern of behavior that is acquired through frequent repetition.

Habits are created with or without your participation. If you want to start a new habit or change an existing one, you need to use conscious (System 2) attention initially. But once something becomes a habit, the unconscious (System 1) takes care of it. Habits are ongoing.

I don’t know why or how this either/or, black/white approach to goals and habits came about, but I first heard of doing away with goals in the 1990s when someone gave me a copy of Living Without a Goal by James Ogilvy. I recall reading a bit of it, attempting to give it a fair shake, but even back then I rejected the premise. Subsequently I’ve come across numerous spokespersons for the Zen-like attractiveness of the goalless life, which is especially prominent in the blogosphere.

What’s Wrong with Goals?

One of knocks against goals is that (horrors!) they limit you. Of course they do, but living without goals also limits you. You face limits no matter what you do because when you’re doing one thing, you can’t be doing four other things at the same time. If you board a plane for London, that’s where you’re likely to land even if you change your mind mid-flight and decide you’d rather land in Adelaide, Australia. Trying to keep all your options open doesn’t enhance your life, it keeps you from living it.

In addition to limiting you, another knock against goals is that they eliminate the element of surprise from your life. The idea that if you set and pursue goals life is going to stop surprising you is absurd.

In fact, you’re much more likely to be surprised (both happily and unhappily) once you set your plan into motion because you’ll be actively engaged in accomplishing something challenging. You may be uncomfortable, you’ll get feedback, you’ll learn new things, you’ll have successes and failures, you’ll have to make course adjustments, and you may even decide to change direction. So you may end up exactly where you hoped you would or you may end up someplace quite different. In either case, you’ll have had a chance to appreciate some new scenery and you’ll know much more about yourself than you would if you’d arrived there randomly.

Furthermore, you’re less likely to be surprised by life if you don’t challenge yourself because the unconscious part of your brain doesn’t like surprises. It wants you to be safe and secure, so it will attempt to keep you in your comfort zone, blissfully unaware of what you’re missing.

What’s Wrong with Giving Up Goals?

After considering their case, I’ve concluded the anti-goals folks get it wrong in four ways.

(1) They are unwilling to make a commitment.

When you commit yourself to one thing—especially to following through on a long-term goal—you agree to forego other things and to sometimes do things you don’t particularly feel like doing in the moment. If you want to change your status quo, you can’t just snap your fingers. You need to take action, you need to be persistent, and you need to figure out how to overcome obstacles. You don’t know ahead of time what your experience will be or how things are going to turn out. Doing something you don’t feel like doing now in order to have something you want in the future may not make you happy, but it’s more likely to enhance the satisfaction and meaning in your life.

Something else that comes across from many in the anti-goal camp is an almost pathological fear of measuring results. I’m sure that measuring results can be carried to an extreme, and when coupled with poorly thought-out goals (or goals determined by someone else), not particularly rewarding or even healthy. But measuring results is how you know when you’re getting closer to or farther away from what really matters to you. Why wouldn’t you want to keep track of that?

(2) They have a poor understanding of what goals really are.

What are the things in life that really matter to you? Your goals should not be ends in themselves, but rather the means of having more of what you really want. If you know what you want, you can either hope that doing whatever you feel like doing in the moment will get you there. Or you can identify goals that can get you more of what you want and then take steps to achieve them.

Many of the arguments for giving up goals seem to imply that once you create one, you’re somehow imprisoned by it. It’s true that a goal without a plan is just wishful thinking, but plans are only rigid if you treat them that way. The best way to approach a goal is by paying attention to feedback and adjusting course as needed. There’s nothing in the definition of a goal that prevents you from being flexible or responding to new information or insights.

Yet another misunderstanding about how to make setting goals more effective is the focus on the outcome rather than on the process. You need to identify your desired outcome so you’ll know what you’re aiming for and will be able to tell when you’ve arrived. But then you need to focus your attention on the steps it will take to get there: on the process. Focusing on the outcome will actually decrease the likelihood of achieving your goal.

(3) They have an inability to identify juicy, enlivening, and expansive goals.

Maybe the real problem is a lack imagination. If the idea of setting goals seems dry and boring to the anti-goal folks, they’re probably not setting the right goals. Maybe they haven’t yet determined what they really want and are still searching. They don’t understand that by undertaking challenges they can stretch their limits and expand their possibilities. They can learn just as much—if not more—than they can learn by meandering moment to moment.

If you do know what you want and have an idea about how to create more of that in your life, you’re likely to find working toward your goals exciting rather than tedious. Of course you won’t be excited about every single step and you won’t be excited every minute of every day. No one is. That’s where having a plan comes in handy. But if you’re not passionate about your desired outcome, let it go and find something else to work toward. Don’t throw out the entire concept of goals.

(4) They lack awareness about how the brain actually works.

Your brain is primed to create habits, but it is not primed to achieve goals. If you do the same thing, under the same circumstances, over and over again, it will become a habit. You will no longer need to focus conscious attention on it because your basal ganglia will have taken it over. Your brain loves repetition and routine. And the unconscious part of your brain actively resists change.

So if you want to change your status quo, which is what a goal is intended to do, you need to focus your conscious attention on completing the steps you’ve outlined until you’ve achieved it. Maintaining focus is not easy. It helps to have a plan that includes a means of measuring your results and rewarding yourself for your accomplishments. If you don’t get your brain to go along with your plan, your brain will get you to go along with its agenda. The unconscious part of your brain is much more interested in immediate gratification than it is in long-term satisfaction—which is why doing whatever you feel like doing in the moment is so appealing. Your brain is generally at the ready to divert your attention to any nearby bright, shiny objects. That means going with the flow is less a philosophical choice and more the path of least resistance of the unconscious part of your brain.

Don’t buy into the anti-goals rhetoric, even if you’ve had negative experiences with goals. Making effective use of goal-setting starts with knowing what you really want and making a commitment to go after it.

Counterfactual Thinking: The World of What Might Have Been

June 15, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Counterfactual thinking is thinking that runs counter to the facts. It consists of imagining outcomes other than the ones that occurred: the way things could have been—or should have been—different from the way they turned out. Being able to imagine different outcomes is an enormous evolutionary and practical advantage. It’s critical in regard to being creative or inventive and in not continuing to make the same mistakes over and over again. But there are different ways of using counterfactual thinking, some of which are effective and some of which are not.

Nonfunctional or Functional?

Nonfunctional counterfactual thinking frequently leads to blame (of self or others), and if carried on long enough, to rumination, stress, anxiety, and depression, as well as to conspiracy theories and alternate versions of reality.

Functional counterfactual thinking is an honest attempt to examine a situation to determine what, if anything, could have been done differently to create a different outcome. It doesn’t involve blame, rumination, or the twisting of facts.

Upward or Downward?

Upward counterfactual thinking focuses on how things could have turned out better, while downward counterfactual thinking focuses on how things could have turned out worse. Focusing on how things could have gone worse tends to make people feel better. You might think this is a good strategy, but it’s a short-term solution that can contribute to long-term difficulties because it decreases the impetus to change.

That’s because focusing on how things could have gone worse prevents people from identifying actual problems that need to be solved or behaviors that need to be modified. Sometimes it’s only a matter of dumb luck that things didn’t turn out worse than they did.

Evidence vs. Information

Perhaps the biggest difference between nonfunctional and functional counterfactual thinking is that in the former case, the events or actions leading to an outcome are perceived as evidence to support a particular agenda, while in the latter case, the events or actions leading to an outcome are perceived as information to be examined without regard to an agenda. (You can read about feedback loops for a more in-depth treatment of evidence vs. information.)

If you are dissatisfied with a particular outcome, the most useful thing you can do is use counterfactual thinking functionally by attempting to determine what led to the outcome and what, if any, changes you could make to be more effective in similar situations in the future.

Analyzing a situation and identifying what you want to change and why you want to change it uses System 2 (conscious) attention, which is why it isn’t always the go-to response. But if you want to use your brain instead of letting your brain use you, and if you want to be a creative rather than a reactive force in your own life, you will sometimes need to do what doesn’t come naturally.